Who is Carol Shaw?

• Despite having made history in the video game industry, at the age of 35 – specifically in 1990 – she decided to retire from the profession.

To mark Girls in ICT Day, we are going to meet some female role models in this field, such as Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, Ángela Ruiz Robles and the group of female mathematicians linked to the US Army during the Second World War known as the Top Secret Rosies.

On this occasion, we’re going to focus on Carol Shaw (1955), an American computer scientist and engineer known for her place in the history of video games as the first female designer in this branch of leisure and entertainment.

Carol Shaw’s Background

Shaw was born in 1955 in the city of Palo Alto, in the US state of California.

She grew up in an environment where technology played a significant role, as her father was an engineer at the National Laboratory for Particle Accelerators at Stanford University, whilst her mother also worked at the same institution as a librarian.

Even during her school years, she stood out for her mathematical talent, which is why one of her teachers set her the task of writing a programme to perform basic calculations. She later learnt to programme in BASIC, thanks to which she discovered that computers could also be used for games.

That is when her interest in video games was sparked.

Carol Shaw’s training and education

This computer science pioneer graduated in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a qualification she complemented with a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the same institution.

It was in 1978, before completing the master’s degree in question, that Shaw began working in the video game industry.

Carol Shaw’s professional career

That year, Shaw joined Atari, from where she moved to Tandem Computers two years later, before switching to Activision in 1982. Another two years later, she returned to Tandem.

At the age of 35, in 1990, Carol Shaw took a new direction in her life and decided to embark on a new professional chapter by leaving the world of video games. Specifically, she began volunteering at various organisations, including the Foresight Institute, where she served as a volunteer lecturer; a research centre focused on disciplines such as nanotechnology, cybersecurity and AI.

Despite having left the video game sector decades earlier, as we have just mentioned, in 2017 she received the Industry Icon Award in recognition of her contributions to the industry.

River Raid

Within Shaw’s professional career, the milestone for which she is best known – during her time at Activision – is having designed and programmed River Raid in 1982, a type of video game in the action genre, specifically a shooter.

It is a vertical scrolling game in which the player controls a fighter plane flying over a river, from which they must shoot at enemy tanks and ships; it is a single-player game.

Although it was not the first (nor the only) video game Shaw created, it was the most successful, selling millions of copies.

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